A Philip Turner Sermon: Look Toward Heaven and Number the Stars

I have searched the memory bank of my life for an example that will display what it is like to place one’s life on such a stage, within such a context; and I think of a story that has come to me of Phoebe Brown-Cave whom I knew during the years I lived in Uganda. Phoebe was a very plain but brilliant woman who read classical languages at university. She went to Uganda as a CMS missionary and taught all her life in a school in Lango. But she did more than that. For some 30 years each day she met with the elders working on a translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into the language of the Lango people. She also counseled people in distress, tended the sick, and sorted out disputes. Phoebe knew everyone and everyone knew her. When the time of her retirement approached, she told the people she would return to England to die. The elders came to her to say, “you can’t go. You belong to us. We want your bones!”

Well, Phoebe did go, and her departure went like this. It was the custom of the missionaries when one of their number came or went to go to the Entebbe airport to greet arrivals and say good by to those leaving. On this occasion, however, one could not get near the airport. There was no space because just about every living soul in Lango had come to the airport by foot, or bike, or taxi, or bus to say good by. Phoebe left carried by the singing of a great multitude. But she did return eventually and there she rests.

My question is this. Does not Phoebe’s life display what it is to place oneself within the vast providence of God? Is her life not a sign of God’s fidelity to his promise and of his power to evoke such a stance in the world? Can we not say of Phoebe, “Therefore, from one woman, and she as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the sea shore?” And can we not say the same thing of ourselves? And can we not say in response, “Thanks be to God?” AMEN.

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